Travis Barker Revisits 2008 Plane Crash and DJ AM’s Death in New CNN Interview

Travis Barker’s new documentary, Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear, is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+, but the drummer’s most revealing material has surfaced outside the film. During an interview on CNN’s All There Is podcast with Anderson Cooper, Barker spoke at length about the 2008 Learjet crash that killed two pilots and two associates, leaving him and DJ AM as the only survivors.

Barker admits he struggled with survivor’s guilt for years. “After my accident, I had a lot of survivors guilt with my two friends and the pilots that passed,” he told Cooper. “It was killing me.” The crash left him afraid to fly for more than a decade; he only returned to air travel in 2021.

The conversation also covers DJ AM’s fatal drug overdose a year after the crash. Barker describes his friend as sober for 15 years and someone he never doubted, but acknowledges that no one knows whether the overdose was intentional or accidental. He recalls a final text from DJ AM about wanting to do drugs and saying “fuck it”—a moment Barker now sees differently. “I thought he was bulletproof,” he said.

Barker also discusses losing his mother to an autoimmune disease shortly before high school. Her final words to him—to pursue music—became his focus. The interview clarifies why the documentary exists: not as a career retrospective, but as an attempt to process grief that has rarely been given this much direct attention.